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MySpace buys social chat service and revamps profiles
MySpace is acquiring staff and assets from Threadbox, a social chat service that aims to combine elements of email and instant messaging. The deal comes as the News Corp-owned social network reveals a redesigned profile page with an emphasis on news feeds, condensed navigation menus and the facility to follow friends on other networks. MySpace is testing the new pages and invites user feedback, promising to share more details in the coming weeks.
MySpace has confirmed the Threadbox acquisition, but is not revealing how much it paid, although the price is likely to be modest as Threadbox has raised just USD2m since it was founded two years ago in Palo Alto, California. MySpace may be hoping to improve its communications services with the Threadbox deal. The network has tried to overhaul its communications before, rolling out free email accounts last year and claiming to have smashed its user targets in January by exceeding 15m accounts. The Threadbox deal could help combine its messaging and email options into a unified service.
The new profile pages may also encourage users to communicate more often through their MySpace accounts, potentially driving traffic. This is crucial as MySpace is suffering from a drastic decline in user numbers and engagement. According to internal figures seen by TechCrunch Europe, monthly visits to MySpace UK halved to just 5m since the beginning of the year, and the trend is thought to be similar in other countries.
MySpace's troubles aren't limited to declining users. It has also been through a string of management changes in the past few months, including the departures of former CEO Owen Van Natta and Jason Hirschhorn, previously co-president. The network is scrambling to find a new identity, having lost the social networking battle to the much larger Facebook. This new identity is intended to focus on gaming and music, however many are sceptical that these new offerings will reverse the network's decline.
